The Star of Istanbul

by Robert Olen Butler

  Which was a good exit line for a good performance and I hobbled off on my cane before he could say any more. Only then did I realize that by cursing with him like a pal—sincerely so, Chicago-style—I’d given him a better feeling about the swells of this country than the swells deserved.

  I moved along west, and the taxi went past me with the driver giving me a respectful nod, which I ignored in order to start bringing him back to the class reality of his bloody country.

  I crossed Jermyn Street to the north side at Brauer’s corner, with Bury Street dead ending there. A couple of doors farther west was a pub, Hotspur, opposite the entrance to these bachelor flats, which had an engraved sign on the lintel: marlborough chambers.

  I entered the bar and sat at a table at the front window. It was still early and slow in the place. I figured I might be here a long time. The delivery wasn’t till eight tonight, about a half hour after sunset. But I didn’t know where Selene was and probably didn’t know where the meeting would be, now that I’d compromised the shop. So Brauer was my only link, and I was a little nervous that he might’ve gone out this morning and would stay out. I had to keep his door under surveillance for as much of the day as I could.

  I nursed Black and Tans for hours, keeping to myself, ignoring the day drunks, and then the light was waning and then it was getting on toward half past seven o’clock and the darkness was washing over the building facades and I was seriously worried Brauer wasn’t in his bachelor flat at all but off somewhere and I’d completely lose the thread.

  And then finally there he was, stepping out of the Marlborough Chambers and looking up and down the street. I guessed for a taxicab. I was glad he didn’t find one. If he’d caught an isolated taxi passing by, I’d have been hard pressed to get one to follow him. But he turned west and walked off.

  I put some cash down and got up quick, belying the bum leg, if any of the guys at the bar were watching. But I was out the door and done with the pub and dotting the pavement with my cane in a quick trot as long as Brauer wasn’t looking my way.

  Staying always on the opposite side of the street, I followed him along Jermyn and then north on St. James. He never once paused or looked back, never considering he might be followed. The next corner was Piccadilly, and as soon as he reached it, he stopped and looked to his left. For a taxi, I again presumed.

  I crossed St. James, trusting my disguise now, and I passed him by, my face averted, dragging my right leg. A newer model Unic, with its headlamps flanking its radiator, was a hundred yards ahead, coming this way slow enough to be scouting a fare. I stepped to the curb and into the street, giving a quick glance in Brauer’s direction. He was partway into the street himself, his hand raised, focused on the same taxi.

  I turned my back in his direction, lifted my hand discreetly but clearly for the taxi, and it stopped. I stepped into the glass-­partitioned tonneau, and I took up the speaking tube and told the cabbie simply to drive on. When we were clear of Brauer, I looked out the rear window. His back was to me, his attention up the street. I told the driver to pull over and wait. Brauer soon caught a massive Panhard Levassor, which would be easy to spot in traffic. He passed us and we followed.

  Brauer took us to the Savoy.

  It was arguably the best hotel in London. Certainly it was the most elegantly out of place in this ubiquitously begrimed city, thick with coal smoke and acrid fog. The Savoy was faced with pale pink terra-cotta and it had a bright green tiled roof. The river side was open and unfettered; Monet had painted the Battersea Bridge and the Houses of Parliament from an upper room. But the Strand approach was down a short street they’d created a decade ago between existing buildings, and the hotel entrance was dim beneath a covered court, lit in the gathering dark of twilight with gas lamps.

  Brauer kept his Panhard waiting while he hustled inside. I kept my Unic, engaging the driver, a quiet old man with a crumpled face and an upcountry accent. I had him for the next few hours if need be, and I started his employ by having him turn us around in the short approach street to face the Strand, and we backed up far enough for me to watch the main hotel doors from the taxi rear window.

  I mostly kept my mind in suspension for the task at hand. But waiting for Selene to make her entrance was difficult for me, since I expected never to touch her again. I even thought for a few moments about spirit gum. It was a classic smell of the theater. And just that tenuous association with acting gave me a brief, ridiculous thought that it had been Selene in my room. Of course it had not.

  Then she appeared. Selene was a dark slash against the glow of gas, wearing a form-fitting ankle-length black coat and a black turban hat with a veil. Brauer was a lapdog trailing pantingly along as she glided from the hotel door and into the taxi. Brauer scrambled in behind, and the Panhard rolled away, disappearing briefly from view and then emerging from the covered court and gliding past us and into the Strand.

  We followed.

  I suddenly realized where they were heading when we turned from Bedford into the short and narrow New Street. A few moments later the Panhard made the left into St. Martin’s Lane. I knew number 53 was just around that corner. The Germans hadn’t changed their plans. Brauer was taking Selene to the bookstore.

  I took up the speaking tube and told my driver to turn in the opposite direction onto St. Martin’s and stop at once by the curb, on the right-hand side.

  The night was dense now with the overcast dark. The streetlights were electric and we were parked not much more than fifty yards from number 53. We sat just past and across the street from another West End theater. The New Theatre. Its facade lights were bright but I was masked in the deep shadow of the tonneau, and I watched through the back window as Selene and Brauer stepped from their taxi and crossed quickly into Metzger & Strauss, Booksellers. The Panhard pulled away and went off down St. Martin’s toward Trafalgar Square.

  I withdrew my watch, and it said 7:56. As I held the gold-filled Elgin, all the newly acquired objects of my life suddenly lapped at me like the North Atlantic at my ankles. I became keenly conscious that the two people who’d just flashed before me in the dark shared that whole event, and so, as I pressed my post-sinking timepiece back into the watch pocket of my post-sinking pants, an odd little complicated tremor passed through me.

  Another taxicab turned out of New Street and rolled to a stop at number 53. I shook off this upswell of trapped air from the vanished Lusitania. I waited for the taxi passenger to emerge. Another principal player perhaps, not associated with the shop. The streetlight was six or eight yards farther along St. Martin’s; Selene and Brauer had appeared mostly as silhouettes. I watched closely as the taxi door opened.

  A man emerged. A slim man, informally dressed in a sack suit, with a soft brimmed hat turned down slightly in front and back, and in a brief flash of dark cameo I could see a sharp-featured profile and a moderate beard. And then he was gone. His cab departed and the street was quiet save for the shuffling past of barhoppers and restaurant diners, the theatergoers already settled in their seats.

  I had time now to wonder: given the events of the morning, why had the Germans not moved the venue for their meeting? Perhaps I’d drastically overreacted. Perhaps this morning they’d never suspected me of anything other than being a snoopy newsman. Perhaps that squeeze on the shoulder would have been the worst of it.

  But surely they’d felt the danger of my somehow knowing about the bookshop.

  And then I went cold. They kept the meeting here to bring me back to them. The guy with the knife and maybe some others were already outside the shop, hanging around the neighborhood, waiting for me to show up so they could finish the work they’d wished to complete this morning.

  I withdrew farther into the shadows of the backseat.

  24

  I scanned all the passersby, all the lingerers, every man within sight of the taxi. Only two that I could see see
med suspicious. But I was relying on the shadows around me in the tonneau, and there were plenty of shadows on St. Martin’s Lane to hide the Huns.

  One of the men I didn’t like the looks of was just across the street, in the far left lobby doorway of the theater. He was a burly man in a three-piece tweed without a hat, smoking a cigarette. This one was the right physical type. He was nearby, and he had the best chance to be checking me out as well. He was hatless, which made me notice him as out of place. That should have made me less suspicious of him, the men watching for me not wanting to make themselves noticeable. But the Germans were smart, and hatless in front of a theater would be smart.

  So I watched carefully as he finished his cigarette. He dropped the butt and stubbed it out with the toe of his shoe. If he lingered on, if he lit another, that would make him a real suspect. But instead he turned and opened the door and went in. I could see him through the windows, crossing the lobby. The curtain had gone up a few minutes ago. He was the director. Or the playwright. Calming his nerves.

  The other guy was farther up and also across the street. I turned my eyes to him. He was still there. He was mostly just a dark shape, but clearly a big guy. He was standing a couple of closed shop doors this side of Cecil Court. Even as I watched, he eased back into the deeper darkness of the doorway behind him.

  I would’ve put two bucks on the nose that this one was a Hun.

  I figured I could sit here in the shadows and wait it out and follow someone at the end of the meeting. I wasn’t getting inside the shop anyway. This taxi might have seemed a bit suspicious after a while, but the Kaiser’s boys couldn’t clearly see who was inside, and what glimpses of me they might get didn’t square with my known appearance. They sure weren’t going to try to drag a vague someone out of the back of an automobile on the streets of London on spec.

  So what was my frame of mind, that I should have almost immediately climbed out of the taxi? I’d never reported on the battles in other people’s wars where I didn’t push as close to the field of fire as I could. Now that I was actually, officially—if secretly—involved in the action against the enemies and potential enemies of my own country, I’d been turned into a goddamn lurker. A sneak. A second-story man with lock picks in his pocket and theatrical disguises. I was once again reduced to watching others do the real stuff, much as I’d always done, only without the bylines. Those few seconds of a fracas in the bookshop were the best of my official secret service career so far. Sitting any longer in the shadows in the taxi, watching from the wings still again while the real actors performed in this play—and not even being able to hear their lines—those would be just about the worst moments of that career. So I figured the least I could do was get out of the taxi and drag my bum leg past the shop. I might see a thing or two inside. I might even pay a visit to the guy in the doorway across the street.

  As soon as I was on the sidewalk I decided that since he was pretty much on my path to the bookstore, I wouldn’t wait; I’d drag my bum leg right past that guy in the shadows.

  I took on my wounded veteran bit part and labored across the street and past the theater, and I focused on the doorway up ahead where I knew he was watching. Let him check me out. Let him decide I was a nobody so that when I crossed over to the bookstore and looked in the window, it would take him some extra time to get suspicious. Or just let him go at me right away. That thought quickened me. Made me want to drop my role and simply deal with him. But I didn’t. Instead, for the moment at least, I relaxed into the role, made the limp look real. But I prepared for action. I angled out to approach along the farthest edge of the sidewalk. I kept my eyes on the doorway.

  He stepped forward a little. A thin slice of him appeared, not quite lit by the electric light across the street but at least suggested by variations of darkness, from hat brim to forehead and nose to shirt front and legs and shoes. Perhaps the sound of my approach—the step and the scrape of me—had brought him out. His face turned toward me but I could see no features.

  I stepped and scraped, stepped and scraped along, and his face was turning as I approached, following me. I’d been inside the dark stretch of street long enough that my eyes had adjusted and I was close now and at last I could see the wide, broken face. It was indeed a Hun; it was the Hun with the staghorn knife who’d tried to rush me at the bookshop.

  “Evenin’ Gov’nor,” I said, sliding down the social scale to make me chattier with a stranger in a doorway.

  The Hun didn’t speak. He glanced down at the drag of my foot. I came even with him and I saw his right hand move inside his coat. A reflex he’d no doubt have even if he were ready to believe I was a local and not the man he was looking for. I trusted the differences in my appearance, especially in the dark, given the brevity of our previous encounter. But I took another step and would soon have my back to him and so I had to make sure.

  I stopped. I turned to face him. “Got a fag?” I asked.

  He kept his gaze full upon me, though I couldn’t read his eyes in the dark. His hand remained inside his coat, on the handle of the knife, I felt certain. He said nothing.

  “Cigarette,” I said, putting my two fingers to my mouth to mime smoking. And I tightened my own hand on the T-shape of the fritz handle of the cane, splitting my fingers firmly around the shaft.

  He still wasn’t saying anything. I thought he might not speak English. Or if he did, he’d have a clear German accent, and if he believed my wounded-British-war-vet disguise, he’d know there could be trouble. He kept hold of his knife inside his coat.

  “You a bloomin’ mute, ducky?” I said.

  He motioned me off with his free hand, a measly little flick of the wrist, like I was a fly on his nose.

  I didn’t move.

  “Go away,” he said in a ponderous German accent.

  Perhaps I should have let things be. He didn’t recognize me. But that was temporary. I wanted to cross this street and see what I could see inside the shop, and I knew I wanted to do even more than that, knew somehow I had to get inside, get closer to what was going on; I knew I had to run more risks now to properly play this role I’d taken on, and I was finally absorbing the reality of the Lusitania, the reality that the Germans were becoming the mortal enemy of my country whether formal war had been declared or not, and this man before me intended to find me and kill me and I’d be compelled to have this out with him very shortly anyway. I needed to make a peremptory strike against my enemy.

  “With that accent,” I said, “you’re the one who should move away.”

  I said this in my own voice. He straightened, looking hard at me in the darkness.

  “That’s right,” I said, ripping my left arm out of the cloth sling. I figured it was only fair that he knew who I was and what was at stake in the fight to come. “I’m Cobb,” I said.

  His knife hand started to move and I had an easier path. My right hand was trigger-ready and I drew up the cane as the knife was coming out and I grabbed the shaft of the cane with my left hand as well, gripping it hard halfway down like a rifle and this was the basic bayonet move. I took a forward step to leverage the thrust of the cane aimed now for the middle of his forehead even as the knife blade glinted as it came free, even in the darkness catching the tiniest fragment of light, but I had to focus on the target and my arms were rushing and my torso powered forward behind this strike and his head was moving off center, he was quick and trying to dodge away but the metal tip of the cane caught him just at the curve of his right temple and his head jerked at the blow but I couldn’t drive through, the hit didn’t feel solid, and yet his knife hand did jerk away from the striking arc he’d begun, and I was pulling the cane back quick to strike again but his head was hard and the blow had glanced and he grabbed the shaft of my cane with his left hand even as he reeled, as he stumbled deeper into the doorway, and so I couldn’t simply pound him unconscious and I was happy now to
play the chess game, sacrificing the cane for both my hands to be free to use on his knife arm, so I let go of the cane handle and it flopped away in his wrenching grip and both his hands were suddenly occupied, which also gave that knife an extra beat of distraction. I grabbed his right wrist in both my hands just as he was beginning a new thrust and in these moments when it was two arms straining against one I twisted the knife sharply from its rush and forced it inward, toward the center of his own chest because he would not stop coming for me, the Germans wanted me dead, and he was strong and his left hand clapped over mine at his wrist and it was both his arms and both mine, both his hands and both mine, and the knife stopped its plunge and we strained hard and we came to a quaking suspension and the knife quivered only a few inches before his chest and he was backed against the door and it was all darkness around us in this tiny place, in this upright casket which echoed with our heavy grunting, and the knife quaked and I strained against this terrible force beneath my hands, squeezed all my body into that knot of hands and he was braced against the door but I was leaning a little downward and my left leg was pressed hard against his right leg and I figured I might have the tiniest fragment of a second to divide my energy, and the leaning would help and our hands trembled and our arms trembled and I took a quick breath and I began to lift my trailing leg and I felt his hands gain strength and felt my own begin to yield, but only for the briefest moment as I flexed my right leg and thrust it hard forward into his crotch and he grunted and I felt the strength in him waver and instantly I redirected my own energy to the knife even as I was falling into him and I drove the blade forward and into his chest.

  I let go and leaped back at once. The blade had gone in deep, I knew. I wanted no part of him now. I straightened upright and from inside the shadows before me came a tightly squeezed cry, remarkably low, remarkably soft, compressed as intensely as our fists had been moments ago, and I felt a sharp pain at my ankle and I jumped back a little. He’d kicked me. But it had not been a conscious blow. The Hun’s feet were shuffling hard, from the pain and the panic and from something like the reflex of a dog struck down by an automobile in the street and lying on its side with its legs still moving as if it could run away from this thing that had happened, run from the pain. It was like that with the Hun: his feet ran and ran and he went nowhere; he could not escape what was happening in the center of his chest. And then the feet stopped running, and they slid a ways toward me as his legs went slack, and the sounds from the shadows stopped, and everything stopped, and he was dead.